With the increasing use of electronic media, the demise of paper as a communication medium seemed plausible. However, the promise of the “paperless” office has not yet come to pass. It is still true, for example, that almost all important documents are printed at least once during their life, because paper is still the most convenient medium for reading, annotating and sharing documents. The combination printer/facsimile/copier room of a work group is a crossroads through which passes much of the relevant information embodied in documents.
Despite the availability of electronic information, within a workgroup employees often rely on social interaction and happenstance to discover relevant new documents and share other kinds of information. Without face-to-face interactions, a person finding a relevant document might not otherwise be aware of a colleague's interest, or might not see the link between a particular piece of information and what he or she perceives as being the colleague's set of interests.
Recommender systems, in particular collaborative recommender systems, can be part of the solution. They help augment the sharing of relevant information and allow users to declare their interests. However, until recently, workplace recommender systems have required active participation from users. For example, in Knowledge Pump (see N. Glance, D. Arregui, M. Dardenne: “Knowledge Pump: Supporting the Flow and Use of Knowledge in Networked Organizations”, U. Borghoff, R. Pareschi (eds.), Information Technology for Knowledge Management, Springer Verlag, Berlin, 1998, and N. Glance, D. Arregui, M. Dardenne: “Making Recommender Systems Work for Organizations”, Proceedings of PAAM'99, 1999), users are expected to identify documents of potential interest to others, classify them, rate them, and optionally provide comments.
The use of implicit ratings (ratings deduced from behavior) to compute recommendations has been proposed in the literature (see D. M. Nichols, “Implicit Rating and Filtering”, in Proceedings of the 5th DELOS Workshop on Filtering and Collaborative Filtering, November 1997, Budapest, Hungary for a review of proposals). However most of these efforts have been limited to collecting user bookmarking and reading actions. Copending, coassigned U.S. patent application Ser. No. 09/596,070 filed Jun. 12, 2000, “Recommender System and Method for Generating Implicit Ratings Based on User Interactions with Handheld Devices,” uses implicit ratings generated from monitoring user interaction with devices such as MP3 players or ebook readers. Copending, coassigned U.S. patent application Ser. No. 09/305,836 filed May 5, 1999, “Finding Groups of People Based on Linguistically Analyzable Content of Resources Accessed” passively captures an organization-related view of the web via conceptual indexing of the pages browsed by workers who declare themselves in “work mode.”
Network office appliances are emerging in the office environment. Network office appliances are boxes that can be plugged into an office network and configured via a standard Internet interface. The services they offer via the network range from file storage to Internet access or email services. An example of a network office appliance service is the Ricoh eCabinet. The eCabinet captures documents that have been printed, faxed, scanned or emailed and builds a digital archive of these documents. The eCabinet then indexes textual information, which has been extracted via optical character recognition, and allows users to browse and search the digital archive. Given the potentially very high volume of data, the device maintains a cache on a hard-disk of the most used documents while recording less frequently used documents on a DVD storage. Handling the DVD-based backup involves some level of administration.
The eCabinet augments a basic print/scan/fax service with additional document services, e.g., document recording, searching, indexing, etc. Augmenting the print/scan/fax service is very convenient for users in that the additional services become activated by passive print/scan/fax actions, inducing very little changes in their existing work practices. However, augmenting the print/scan/fax service involves buying and installing additional dedicated eCabinet hardware and software on the local area network.
A software based solution for providing additional services to a print/scan/fax device is the Xerox Documents.com. Documents.com enables users of the system to input and output document collections, but requires uploading and downloading of files. Documents.com includes four primary services (OCR, format conversion, summarization and print and distribute).
Recommender systems which capture implicit ratings generally provide the benefit of obtaining a greater number of ratings than those systems requiring active participation. A recommender system which generates implicit ratings in a work group environment would provide even greater benefits. A system which augments print/scan/fax services without the need to acquire additional dedicated hardware or the need for users to upload and download files would provide benefits to users.